Business process modeling may be deployed to represent the real-world processes of an enterprise on paper or within a computer system. Business process modeling may for example be performed to analyze and improve current enterprise processes. Managers and business analysts seeking to improve process efficiency and quality may turn to business process modeling as a method to achieve the desired improvements. In the 1990s, the vision of a process enterprise was introduced to achieve a holistic view of an enterprise, with business processes as the main instrument for organizing the operations of an enterprise. Process orientation meant viewing an organization as a network or system of business processes. The certain benefits of investing in business process techniques were demonstrated in efficiency, increased transparency, productivity, cost reduction, quality, faster results, standardization, and, above all, in the encouragement of innovation, leading to competitive advantage and client satisfaction.
The processes created through business process modeling are often complex and may contain many variants or potential process flows. While information technologies (IT) have been a key enabler in achieving some of the benefits mentioned above, these technologies have been slow to fully deal with all the complexities of executing business process models. IT systems are particularly poor at handling any sort of real-time configuration of business process models. Current IT system may implement some sort of static configuration parameters, which fail to fully consider all the potential environmental inputs to a complex business process.